An eccentric detective novel bursting with comedy and personality.
Quirky characters collide chaotically in Rieger’s darkly comedic detective novel.
Robbers burst into a Baltimore hair salon and critically injure a plucky actor. The reader is afforded just a taste of the action before the story jumps back six weeks, then back 25 years, and then forward again, continuing to haphazardly flit through 30 years of related characters and situations every few pages. Among the chaotic jumble of stories, three arcs act as anchors: First, there is the story of Kev Dixit, a cop. He is cynical yet endearing, a family man who stays true to the people and the city he loves as he investigates fraud, robbery, and outlandish murders. Second, Lou Ricciti and Pete Palanzo, pros in the real estate business, find their lives upended upon the arrival of some sketchy new bosses who are up to no good. Finally, actor Chris Waxley struggles to find work and love in an unforgiving city. The author demonstrates an exceptional ability to create eccentric personalities that are lovable, detestable, and everything in between (as when a self-deluding pastor complains about his mistress: “And then while she was so giddily laughing at me and making fun of me, she revealed her latest canvas. It was her hand with a flyswatter about to cruelly strike at a small housefly, painted with glasses and a tie to represent me! Me!”). Each character, no matter how fleeting, teems with potential—potential that is unfortunately often wasted in a story that jumps around so spasmodically and gives the reader so little time to settle in and cozy up to the characters. Dixit, in particular, seems like a sure fan favorite if given more time—his detective work is a joy to read. Each passage is comical and quirky, albeit confusing and brief. Still, there is much enjoyment, entertainment, and, above all else, potential, in Rieger’s story.
An eccentric detective novel bursting with comedy and personality.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781627204606
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Loyola Press
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.
An ordinary woman finds extraordinary adventures on a river cruise on the Seine.
Muriel Blossom acknowledges that she’s a “no-frills” person, a trait that served her well when doing surveillance for Baltimore PI Tess Monaghan. When she gets an unexpected upgrade on her British Airways flight to Paris, she finds herself not only in business class, but on the other side of the looking glass. Allan Turner, a handsome stranger, befriends her in the Chesapeake Lounge, which her upgrade allows her to access. She misses her connection at Heathrow because of the weather, so he invites her to share his luxurious suite in a London hotel, paid for, he insists, by his firm. Then he sends her off on the Eurostar train to reach Paris via the Chunnel in time for her ship’s departure. Once in Paris, she meets another stranger, younger but equally attentive. Danny Johnson takes her to a friend’s atelier in the Marais where the plus-sized Muriel can find the fashionable clothing she deserves. A mysterious man in a bellman uniform knocks on her hotel-room door and invites her to leave her luggage in the hallway so it can be transferred overnight to her ship, but of course she realizes that’s nonsense. She also receives the news that Allan died in a fall from his balcony the night after she left London. When Danny turns up on her cruise, she knows something’s off, but she can’t put together the pieces. That’s because Lippman is unrivaled in her ability to lay out clues in a way that makes them seem not only mysterious, but downright surreal. Only at the end does everything fit together so naturally that it all seems blazingly obvious. Like Muriel, who’s patient and sensible to the end, you’ll just have to wait.
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9780062998101
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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